That's about 50% longer more than I get on my own last-gen 17-in. MacBook Pro, but a far cry from nine hours. (Doing the same tasks on that laptop drained the battery in three hours, though the older model's larger screen means it's not a direct one-to-one comparison.)

To extend the battery life, I went back to the default settings in the Energy Saver preference pane. This dims the display a bit, darkens it completely after a couple of minutes of idle time and puts the hard drive to sleep when possible. That bumped the battery life to just over five hours. Finally, using the test account, I set the screen brightness at the halfway mark, surfed the Web, did some text editing and listened to streaming radio over iTunes. This time, I was able to use the MacBook Pro for just over 6.5 hours. That's impressive, given that the new lineup has faster processors and better graphics chips.

The lesson's pretty clear: When you're on the go, stick with the default Energy Saver settings and turn the screen brightness down. If you're working in a dim locale or perhaps on the red-eye heading cross-country, turning the brightness way down and the Wi-Fi off will extend battery life even more. And if you find that your battery time is substantially less than you'd counted on, you might want to set up a new account and see if that helps. It did for me.

As solid as the graphics system is -- I saw nary a hitch when watching videos or doing some light digital video exports -- it's the Core i5 and i7 processors in the 15-in. and 17-in. models that buyers will likely key in on. That's because they're relatively efficient for the punch they pack, and even though they're dual-core chips, they bring at least a pseudo-quad-core flair to the upper end of Apple's laptop line. Let me stress the word pseudo here: These are not the same as the real quadcore chips that the iMac desktop line uses.